Too Many Girls

Too Many Girls is a charming, light-weight and vapid college musical based on the Broadway show by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. What it has going for it is a fine Rodgers & Hart score, enthusiastic and talented actors (several of whom, such as Eddie Bracken, Desi Arnaz, Hal LeRoy and Van Johnson, were re-creating their Broadway roles), a couple of first-rate production numbers and a nostalgic look at a long-ago time when co-eds wore beanies and college football was played just for the fun of it.

Connie Casey (Lucille Ball), the head-strong daughter of a rich industrialist who has been trying to keep her out of trouble, decides she wants to go to Pottawatomie University, her father's alma mater, in Stop Gap, New Mexico. Dad agrees, but secretly hires four college football stars as bodyguards. "Kelly," he says to one of them, "would you like a job? Good pay, long hours, hard work. You're not afraid of that, I suppose?" "Oh, no, sir," Clint says. "Good pay never frightened me any."

Connie, unknown to her Dad, has fallen for a famous British author who has a ranch near Stop Gap. The four new bodyguards are Clint Kelly (Richard Carlson), Jojo Jordan (Eddie Bracken), Al Terwilliger (Hal LeRoy) and Manuelito Lynch (Desi Arnaz). Once everyone is enrolled, things do not go smoothly. There are lovely co-eds to distract our bodyguards (the ratio of male to female at Pottawatomie is 1 to 10). There is the football team that desperately needs help if it is ever to win a game. There are all those creaking jokes. When Jojo is surrounded by cute and adoring Pottawatomie co-eds one day, he's asked if he'd ever dated any of those eastern girls. "Oh, I went with a senior at Wellesley," Jojo tells them. "They're all air-conditioned." "What do you mean, air-conditioned?" "Forty degrees cooler in the house than on the street."

Mainly, there is Connie to be kept from her paramour, which is both made easier and more difficult when Clint falls for her, Connie reciprocates and then finds out he was sent to keep an eye on her. Well, Connie is hurt and angry. She decides to leave Pottawatomie on the night train going back east...and her football-playing bodyguards must go with her. But wait. There's a crucial game the next day. Without Clint, Jojo, Al and Manuelito there's no hope that Pottawatomie can win. Only if Connie realizes how much she loves Clint and relents can our boys play. I know you're in suspense over what Connie decides, but I don't believe in spoilers. You'll have to watch the movie.

The primary reason to see the movie is the Rodgers & Hart score. This was the only film version of a Thirties Rodgers & Hart production that even remotely resembled the Broadway original. The score has one classic, "I Didn't Know What Time It Was," and one near classic written specifically for the movie, "You're Nearer." Since this is a college movie, Rodgers & Hart came up with some real rousers; pep songs before a game and victory songs after: "'Cause We Got Cake," "Spic and Spanish" and "Look Out." The climax is a near hallucinogenic production number that features a bonfire, pulsing rhythm, flickering shadows and Desi Arnaz sweating and beating a bongo drum while he struts amidst the cheering throng. Rodgers & Hart also came up with a lovely, gentle gem of a song, "Love Never Went to College," that demonstrates why Hart was one of the best in the business.

Lucille Ball is a knock-out. Richard Carlson is stalwart and a bit wooden. This was Eddie Bracken's first movie and he's great...especially when he sings his version of "I Didn't Know What Time It Was." Hal LeRoy, like Bracken, is around to provide comic relief. He was a gifted and distinctive dancer. He has one tap segment in the Spic and Spanish number which is extraordinary. He's not only fast, but his knees seem to be double-jointed. Desi Arnaz makes a funny and endearing impression as the guy who is always ready for a game or a dame. Frances Langford, long forgotten by most nowadays, was a pop singer of style and great popularity during the Forties. She does a fine job as the student body president. She does an even finer job singing some of the songs. Ann Miller is there to do her machine-gun taps and precision twirls. And although Van Johnson is unbilled (he's listed on IMDb as Chorus Boy Nr. 41), his one line is vital to Pottawatomie and to the movie. "We won the game, so help me!"

Too Many Girls is an interesting film for the above reason and is worth the look also. But while a long way from the worst film musicals, it is not a particularly great film either. There are definitely things that do salvage it. Desi Arnaz is very charming in his role and gives it his all, though his singing can sound strained because of the register. The songs make for very pleasant listening, I Didn't Know What Time It Was is the best number and is a classic, though other than that none really are among Rodgers and Hart's best. Hal LeRoy beguiles with his dancing and toe-work, and you have to love the comedy comebacks of Eddie Bracken as well as the vocal talents of Frances Langford and the dancing of Ann Miller. The football footage is interesting too, the film does look nice if not quite audacious and look out for Van Johnson. Too Many Girls has all those good things but is for me a very flawed film. When there aren't any songs, much of the film is weak with draggy pacing, a pretty dispensable story and stilted dialogue. The direction and choreography are definitely competent- the Conga at the end is an absolute riot and anything danced by Ann Miller is fun enough- but are not particularly memorable and could have had more passion. Lucille Ball's Connie is too exaggerated, and while the singer providing her singing voice has a beautiful silky voice- much better than Ball's, whose I can't stand, especially in the dire Mame- it is one of those instances where you can actually tell it's not the actor/actress singing. And Richard Carlson is unbearably wooden here too. Overall, not a bad film, not a good one either, kind of a difficult one to judge actually because there is some entertainment value there are a lot of noticeable bad things too. 5/10 Bethany Cox

You can't really appreciate the pace and style of the great movie musicals until you've seen some lousy ones like this. A really awful 1930s or 1940s musical movie can induce a sort of restful trance, and take you into another world of stunned tedium. If you know only Rodgers and Hart's great songs which survived shows and became standards, you'll be astounded by how many strained and stupid ones come in between them in the course of a plotted show. The story-scenes are acted in a stiff and disinterested style. Actors seem just to be waiting for others to stop speaking so they can say their lines, rather than actually listening to each other. And why should they listen? What they say is overwritten, repetitious, and yet often indirect and incomplete as far as telling the story is concerned. The plot manages to be both contrived and clumsy, unlikely to the point of being fantastic--yet who would fantasize such dreariness? This effect is probably partly the result of prudish Hollywood trying to adapt a supposedly "spicy" script direct from supposedly "wicked" and "sophisticated" Broadway, and therefore inserting or deleting lines to keep the script "clean" but still leave the impression that it's "daring." But the prudishness seems hypocritical, and the sophistication way, way overestimated. Trying to convey both attitudes, yet neither, the actors become robotic and stressed. And the sets are so stagy that it's a shock when suddenly one scene is played on a real ball-field. Perhaps the most characteristic moment comes when Lucille Ball makes a remark about a boyfriend which is clearly the lead-in for a song, and then, as mechanically as a wind-up toy, while the other actors in the room watch helplessly, with nothing to do, crosses a whole room, goes out onto a porch, hits a position, stares into a light, and lip-syncs woodenly to a voice obviously not hers. Another: after what seems an endless discussion of the troubled finances of a college (which turn out to have nothing to do with the story at all), one boy donates the three hundred dollars (?) that's needed, and the college is opened, at which point for some reason everyone participates in a production number called, "Cakewalk, 'Cause We Got Cake," possibly left over from some other situation in the Broadway original (some of its lyrics seem to relate to Depression optimism), and performed not as a cakewalk, but a swing number. Also, as is to be expected in a "college musical" of the time, the main characters are far past college age, so their sexual coyness seems retarded. The ultimate effect is one of dreamlike slowness and isolation and illogic, making this trivial nonsense seem related to the existential sadness of De Chirico's paintings or Kafka's novels. The movie may be even more bewildering to younger viewers today because of changed social attitudes. A long scene among four boys is oblique to the point of mystery because in 1940 none of them could actually say that certain girls wearing certain "beanie" caps are virgins (there are a couple of incredibly labored attempts later at jokes about these caps). Lucille Ball, giving an old Native American man a letter to carry for her to a lover, calls the messenger, "Boy," and Latino Desi Arnaz not only has an awkward gay joke early in the film, but later performs a song called "I'm Spic and Spanish."

With obvious clumps of studio foliage, this movie must have certainly cost very little to make: however, it does have a few saving graces (Lucille Ball, Ann Miller, and Frances Langford amongst the girls; Richard Carlson, Desi Arnaz, and Eddie Bracken amongst the boys; a handful of good songs from the Rodgers and Hart show - including 'I Didn't Know What Time It Was'). Between the musical numbers it drags quite badly and seems pretty stilted - some of the script has lines like: 'we're handing our strip back'/'you mean you're going to play in the nude?'; 'I'm looking for the Stunted Hag.'/'No, this is the Hunted Stag.'; 'You know, that college that doesn't give its right name - Smith.' and so on.

The tale of a wayward girl going to her father's cheapo alma mater and shadowed by four Ivy League students is not that original, or done in a particularly interesting way. But, at the few moments when the music kicks in, it just about saves itself from oblivion.

Some movies become important, not because of their subject or their cinematic relevance (or irrelevance in some cases), but because of other circumstances.

In this case, it's the film that brought together two of television's greatest personalities and business people: Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. Both were struggling actors trying to make their images a commodity in the Hollywood of the late Thirties and early Forties. Arnaz, however, was less an actor than a musician so he had material on which to fall back on. Ball, on the other hand, was today's Parker Posey -- you always saw her star in B-movies and rarely, if ever, in "major productions". Back then, though, such a thing was looked down upon and Ball in this vehicle didn't fare better: she remained rooted in the B's.

So with Ball and Arnaz coming together in 1940, it is reported that the sparks were loud and clear and despite their personality and racial differences, they were to begin an alliance which would legally last 20 years, but emotionally, a lifetime. Neither of them share scenes together other than the ones in which their characters happen to appear on screen simultaneously, which would have been great in order to capture what they were about to experience (much in the style of Hepburn and Tracy, and Bogart and Bacall), but that's okay. We know the history of Lucy and Desi and if anything, this movie is the catalyst for their union.